The sun, growing less a source of light than a brilliant circle of carmine, almost touched the western range; the shadow troop swept down the slope and lengthened across the valley; cut by the trunks of trees the light fell in dusty gold bars across the water. Gordon drew the line through the dipping tip, knotting on three of the flies. Then he quietly followed the stream to where it fell into a circular, stone-bound basin. He made his cast with a quick turn of the wrist, skilfully avoiding the high underbrush, the overhanging limbs. The flies swung out and dropped softly on the water. On the second cast he caught a trout--a silvery, gleaming shape flecked with vermilion and black, shaded with mauve and emerald and maroon. In a shallow reach he waded, forgetful of his clothes. He caught another trout, another and another, stringing them on a green withe. He cast indefatigably, but with the greatest possible economy of effort; his progress was all but soundless; he slipped down stream like a thing of the woods, fishing with delicate art, with ardor, with ingenuity, and with continual success. The sun disappeared in a primrose void behind the darkening mountains; the hush deepened upon the valley, a hush in which the voice of the stream was audible, cool--a sound immemorially old, lingering from the timeless past through vast, dim changes, cataclysms, carrying the melancholy, eloquent, incomprehensible plaint of primitive nature. Gordon was absorbed, content; the quiet, the magic veil of oblivion, of the woods, of the immobile mountains, enveloped and soothed him, released his heart from its oppression, banished the fever, the struggle, from his brain. The barrier against which he still fished was mauve, the water black; the moon appeared buoyantly, like a rosy bubble blown upon a curtain of old blue velvet. He cast once more, and met his last strike, a heavy jar that broke the weakened line, in a broad, still expanse where white moths fluttered above the water in a cold, stagnant gloom. He saw the rotting wall of a primitive dam, the crumbling, fallen sides of a rude mill. Night fell augustly. The whippoorwills cried faint and distant. He sat on a log, draining his shoes, pressing the water from his trousers, and smoked while the light of the moon brightened into a silvery radiance in which objects, trees, were greyly visible; reaches sank into soft obscurity. He recognized his position from the ruined mill--he was on the edge of that farm of Pompey Hollidew's of which Bartamon had spoken. Hollidew, he knew, seldom visited his outlying acres, then only in the collection of rents or profits--they lay too far from his iron chest, from the communication of the Stenton banks. Gordon knew Sim Caley, and, suddenly, he decided to visit him; the trout would afford the Caleys and himself an ample repast.